Presentation: Adaptive Water Demand Forecasting for Near Real-time Management of Smart Water Distribution Systems

Adaptive Water Demand Forecasting for Near Real-time Management of Smart Water Distribution Systems United Utilities, a leading UK Water Company, in conjunction with Academia (University of Exeter), have developed a novel methodology to perform short-term Water Demand Forecasting (WDF) with the aim to support near real-time operational management of smart Water Distribution Systems. This data-driven methodology makes use of Evolutionary Artificial Neural Networks. United Utilities is interested in how these type of advanced analytics can be more readily developed and applied i.e. in an agile way, in particular by linking operational data and analytics platforms. With this in mind, we have teamed up with OSIsoft to develop a fully automated Demand Forecasting System (DFS) that exploits OSIsoft AF as well as the PI Integrator for Business Analytics to prepare and bring the near real-time water demand data from PI System to the MATLAB machine learning model. The use of this DFS can assist providing timely operational decisions and supporting tasks, such as production planning, pump scheduling, etc. The results of this proof-of-concept will be presented along with a discussion on the next steps.